The amount of multimedia information generated by our users is dramatically increasing nowadays. In particular, the number of photographs that are taken, uploaded to web servers, needed to be reviewed and processed, or simply shared with others (e.g. after a holiday trip) is unmanageable by individuals. Then, there is a clear need to automate the process of photo selection.
For professional photographers the problem is basically the same: a big amount of photographs taken during sessions (e.g. fashion week events) which need to be reviewed, selected and post-processed. A tool which simplifies their workflow and facilitates their job in the darkroom is really a must for most of them. Take into account that most of professional photographers are freelance, and then they appreciate very much to dedicate more time to take photos and to deal with potential customers.
The selection of photos is currently done based on user's rating, tagging or any kind of metadata (e.g. camera model, shutter speed, f-stop, ISO and so on) but not considering other parameters regarding user's behaviour.
For instance, patent document US2004126038 discloses an external device that tags photographs from cameras. However the present invention makes use of tagging in a first step (then the better the tagging is, the better the results are) but another ones are required as prefiltering, filtering and tuning to sort them properly.
Document US2006173746 discloses an efficient methods for temporal event clustering of digital photographs. It deals with the clustering of photographs considering their time-stamps. The present invention is not related to the clustering of photographs but to find the optimal number of photos and its order to be shown them to each user.